dear nylon

March 23, 2009

so i got the spring fashion issue of nylon the other day, the one with the girl from twilight on the cover, and, you know, i highly recommend it (they have a myspace fifth anniversary special where they ask cory kennedy what is the “most awesomely bad wallpaper” she’s ever seen!). there’s a lot of ridiculosity and quotatiousness in nylon but i think the most ridiculous part of nylon is the letters to the editor section, which in nylon is called “dear nylon.” letters to the editor sections in most magazines and newspapers are ridiculous in general but in nylon this is taken all to an absurd level. in the march issue, out of the twelve letters, eight have nothing at all to do with anything specifically related to the magazine; they don’t address, you know, issues from the issue. this is kind of weird — i guess you see a little of it in other mags (“dear maxim, I LOVE MAXIM — tim, oklahoma) but usually people are responding to something specific that they read or saw in a previous issue (“dear playboy, this is just to say that lorna love (december ’08) has some of the finest knockers i’ve ever seen in my life. — dave, minnesota”). but the nylon letters have nothing to do with the magazine besides the girls loving the magazine giving them the excuse to write them. they’re much more a platform for identity sculpting and self definition — it’s like the letter writers are posting on the facebook wall of their most popular BFF and they know a lot of people are going to read it so they have to get it just right, make the perfect references and quotes, toe the line between sincerity and irony, be sexyfunnycool instead of being just sexy or funny or cool, and it’s all just too good. so anyway, i had this rockish track i’ve been working on that i couldn’t write lyrics for (previously) and so i just decided to do readings of the letters from nylon as the lyrics.